The Secret to Getting Highly Targeted Traffic from StumbleUpon

In fact, using StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your site can produce some amazing results. According to Shell Harris, StumbleUpon basically built her website TopTenz. Here are some of her stumble numbers that she shared:

That’s huge traffic, and it can create some pretty lucrative income stream. The only problem is that traffic isn’t very targeted, and your conversion rates may suck.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a modest stream of traffic but high conversion rates rather than high traffic stream and low conversion rates.

Let’s look at how you can get a high-quality traffic stream from StumbleUpon.

Step #1: Become a stumbler

You won’t be able to use StumbleUpon correctly unless you become a stumbler. If this is new to you, to “stumble” simply means to discover web pages by clicking the StumbleUpon button on your browser bar.

This is what it looks like on Chrome:

StumbleUpon will deliver articles, images, videos and much more based upon your profile and interests. You’ll then get to vote on whether you like those suggestions or not. The more you stumble, share and vote, the better the algo gets at predicting what you like.

Now, since you’ll be using StumbleUpon to promote your own blog in hopes of getting targeted traffic, you need to stumble and vote on pages that are similar to your content.

What this does is it identifies other stumblers who have similar to yours ratings and usage patterns. This will get content you stumble, eventually including your own, in front of these users as they stumble. If one of these users sees your content and likes it, that person submits it for others to see. That gives your content a chance to become part of a chain reaction, where high-quality stumblers share it with other high-quality stumblers.

Step #2: Follow like-minded stumblers

StumbleUpon is unique in that users are clustered into very specific categories depending upon your stumbles, preferences and even connections.

For example, you may be an entrepreneur and not have that much in common with everyone who is in that category.

But after dozens of very specific stumbles and votes, you’ll eventually be getting stumbles based on a very narrow brand of entrepreneurship that interests you.

In other words, you’ll start to get matched with highly targeted stumblers who think like you and who will probably even be interested in engaging with you and your content.

If you and other users start to thumb up similar content, then StumbleUpon may eventually show your content to those users.

Step #3: Submit interesting web pages – and not just yours.

You can certainly promote your own content on StumbleUpon, but if that is all you do, then it’s not likely that you will create a strong following since, like all social platforms, StumbleUpon works well when you are social. That means that you contribute other people’s valuable content to the discussion.

Besides, StumbleUpon does monitor user activity and may prohibit activity if all you do is promote your own stuff.

The point of StumbleUpon is to build up content in its collection that adds value to the community. This will keep you in good standing according to their Terms of Service and add credibility to your name in the community.

Keep in mind that you can view which of your discoveries have been viewed the most. It will give you an indication of what people like and don’t like to see.

This will be helpful when it comes to sharing your own content…you want to be able to submit content that will resonate with the audience.

Step #4: Create clear web pages

When it comes to optimizing your site for the StumbleUpon community, there is one really important rule you must remember: the content on your page must be crystal clear to anyone who sees your page.

Stumblers like to explore pages that are designed to make sense and appear to reward exploration. Give the Stumbler visuals and good writing, along with links to other content on your site to encourage deeper exploring.

TED is a good example of this.

When you land on one of its pages, it’s clear from the start what the user must do.

That includes additional options that the Stumbler can explore like a bio to read or other videos to watch.

Enter the URL – This is going to be the page that you want stumblers to visit. To track this via Google Analytics, you can enter a utm_parameter by adding this to the end of the URL http://yoursite.com/yourpage.html?utm_source=stumbleupon&utm_medium=paidscovery&utm_campaign=social

Choose topics – StumbleUpon gives you the option to choose up to 10 topics, or you can let it guess the topics based upon the content. You also have the option to split campaigns into topics if you want.

Choose your audience – Set the demographics you want this content to get in front of based upon age, gender, location or device. Alternatively, let StumbleUpon optimize this for you.

Set your budget – A priority placement will bump you to the front of the que. Or you can upgrade and set your highest daily spend, which will calculate how many visitors it will send to your site based upon your plan and budget. A budget of $30 a day will send you 300 visitors a day.

Schedule – Finally, if you set the campaign to start immediately once the ad is approved, then it will run until you run out of money. Or you can set campaign dates so that the submitted page shows up over a period of time.

Add funds – From your dashboard, go to the Account area and add funds from your PayPal account or credit card.

Finally, here are some tips to help you optimize your Paid Discovery campaigns:

Try your content in multiple categories to test what works best. StumbleUpon’s new metric score is a great way to see which categories drive the most stumbles.

To find out which categories are the most popular, you can select “manual targeting” before you submit your content to Paid Discovery.

Step #6: Use StumbleUpon Badges

Another way to get targeted traffic is to have your visitors submit your page, vote or share your content via the StumbleUpon badge.

Putting this badge on your site is easy since it requires no coding…just simple cut and paste.

Of course, if you prefer to customize it, you can use StumbleUpon’s badge API. You’ll get all the information you need to build a badge perfectly suited to your site.

This customization will also help you offer information on the badge like if that page has already been submitted, how many stumbles it’s gotten and the pages thumbnail and meta data on StumbleUpon.

Conclusion

While StumbleUpon is not often in the spotlight like other social platforms, e.g., Pinterest, Instagram or Tumblr, it’s still a great workhorse for delivering high-quality traffic…if you do it right.

And, if you spend a lot of time online like I do, stumbling stuff all day won’t take extra hours out of your day…it will become part of your routine.

Do you know of any other ways to drive high-quality traffic from StumbleUpon?

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Comments

I have seen some great results from stumbleupon but like you mentioned its not targeted so i have tended not to focus on this, having said that I still use it, low conversions but a conversion is a conversion and is better than none lol.

David, I will say one thing, StumbleUpon paid discovery often has a pretty good stick rate if you’re in the right industry.

Stumblers aren’t too big of fans of marketing sites, same with Reddit and the like, but humor/taboo content is up their alley, along with informative content, especially “lifehacks” and psychology related stuff (or maybe that’s just from my experiments.

I’m not so sure how easy it would be to convert the traffic into genuine leads and sales. In the past, the typical bounce rate of SU has been high. But, maybe certain content can help Stumblers stick around?

I have used SU before but never did took it seriously. If I did now I would definitely be striving for high numbers in my Stumbles. Once this is done, then I can concentrate on building a following only withing my industry such as IT or SEO, as you pointed Neil.

This traffic can be funnelled to a landing page. Oh a form woudl help.

Good food for thought here Neil. Stumbleupon does seem pretty attractive and like it would be a good way of creating high traffic. The problem, however, is that most stumblers are passive and are there to browse, not actually take action and go deep into anything…which makes it tough to get conversions.

I have no doubt that there are success stories though, and for the right site it could be a very valuable source of traffic.

I have been using Paid Stumble for a while and notice great traffic but not great conversions. Analyzing the time-spent on-site and they pages Stumblers visited revealed a 2 very different types of Stumblers.

There were the Stumble-scan-Stumble people that spent smallest amount of time on-site, and then there were the Stumblers that explored the site (at least 3 pages), these were about 10% of the overall numbers of Stumbles and these are the people that I wanted to engage with.

The problem though was that I couldn’t discern how to get the ‘good’ stumblers. Reading through your post, I think I just figured it out. Using these tips AND the Paid Stumble I will get much better results.

I’ve tried the StumbleUpon strategy and it brought great traffic but no conversions as stated above. I think that using your techniques+paid discovery+ retargeter is a winning combo; however, you truly need to make yourself standout with good branding and even better content.

Hi Neil,
You write ” To track this via Google Analytics…”, why if your KISSMetrics is GA’s competitor?
I understand that everybody uses GA, but why would you mention them and not your own product?
PS I’m new to your blog and I’m sincerely curious

I suggest Google Analytics because it is a free service, where mine is not. My readers tend to be beginners or still building. So I like to suggest tips or tools that are either free or at very little cost.

Thanks Neil
I am a beginner and have been focused on getting established on FB & TW. This post being your endorsement of SU means I will have to make my blog a part of that community.
The direction given by this post will be of help getting me noticed there soonest.

That’s a surprise that some people say forget about StumbleUpon, I agree with you that it could still be good. Nice explanation there as to why stumbling an inner content page instead of the home page could result in more people seeing and sharing it.

I have had a couple of posts go viral though stumble upon recently attracting upto 500 hits a day.

In my experience the key is to create interesting content for the broader audience in you niche as very specific posts tend to attract less attention. For eg my blog is about niche marketing but I wrote a post about 10 things that make online marketers less productive which went on a mini viral frenzy on stumble upon.

Yes the biggest problem with stumble upon is that the trafic is usually not targeted. Last week I got 7,000 views within first five hours of submitting a post about creative business card designs. But I got no real long term value from those visits as my bounce rate was over 80%.

Paid discovery worked really well for us. But here is a little secret. Add something to your site that encourages stumble visitors to thumb you up. You’ll get a bunch of extra traffic as you work your way higher into the rankings.

Great tips Neil, thanks! I use StumbleUpon and often I received good traffic, but unfortunately they spend only few seconds on the site. I think over 90% spend less than 5 seconds. I didn’t tried yet the paid advertising, but to be honest I’d be somewhat afraid from the some reason ( if visitors stay on site only few seconds?)
Does someone tried the paid advertising? Thanks!

When I sign up in Stumble, should I use my personal email or email @myblog.com? Should my username have any form of the name of my blog (for example, “MyBlog” or “MyBlog.com”) in it or should it be neutral?

Thanks for the informative post. I did try the stumbleupon paid discovery but to be honest it was not for me as I found that although I got a lot more visits the bouce rate was still high and time spent on the site was not great. I think it is just not targettted enough.

I do agree with also stumbling as when I started I just promoted my own sites it was not until I stumbled and liekd sites my self that I noticed a difference

Nice writeup Neil.. Thanks for sharing these tips for gaining the traffic. Iam using Stumbleupon since from 3-4 years and it brought me lesser traffic as compare to facebook and twitter. I will definitly use the paid one …

I’ve been slowly ramping my online efforts back up over the last few weeks after taking some time off. One thing I’ve wondered was how to best use StumbleUpon because I always saw it as something that was a bit “untargeted”. Thanks for showing me how to better target Stumbles to my content!

I always wanted to ask a question: how do people use SU to getting traffic for their site? Someone said it was a great traffic source for them, however, it’s not working for me, thanks for the post, I know where I went wrong.

This article was amazing. I’ve never used SU before and I tried it and now I was getting more traffic from SU than from searches.
However, could you explain why the traffic dies down after a few days? For example, I submit a new page and I’ll get about 200 stumbles for about 2 days. Then, after that, nobody is stumbling onto my site all of a sudden. I can’t get around to why this happens. I wish the traffic was more consistent or long term.

Hi Neil,
Wonderful post. I have a question: I run a blog/podcast where I compose and play a new piece of pianomusic everyday and I have been trying all sorts of ways to get more trafficamong which SU. It has been growing but because my main focus lies on the music instead of words I find it difficult to get targeted traffic. Not only that, but most of the traffic I get listens through iTunes and never even gets to see the actual website. Do you have any tips on how to find more traffic and how to monetize a free three minute podcast without having to place ads in the podcast itself?
Thanks!
Regards,
Hilmar

Nice post. I recently started using Stumbler and I noticed something interesting in my traffic stats. I noticed that whenever I stumble any of my article, within two minutes, I get 20-30 pageviews (as shown by my blog traffic stats). And then no traffic comes after even 5 minutes to whole week. Are these 20-30 pageviews from real visitors or some kind of bots? Can you please answer me?

Itâ€™s definitely good for the ego, and you never know. Maybe you only get one person to re-tweet your content, but that one person could have a powerful following themselves which makes it all worth it.

Not sure if you will be able to answer this question since it has been a while this article has been posted. We recently started using Stumble Upon paid version. The bounce rate is huge around 80%. Is it normal? Any thoughts on bringing it down?
Thanks in advance
Chris

nice post ! I use to get traffic from stumble but suddenly it stopped , now no traffic on my website , but other website that I submit do gets decent views . Is there any way to recover if my website is penalized there ?

I am not targeting StumbleUpon much now. I know that people are driving good traffic from StumbleUpon but whenever i tried to use StumbleUpon as a traffic source,i failed. It just wastes my time nothing more.

To say frankly, After using stumbleupon for a few weeks, I came with empty hands. I think we must has a powerful strategy and consistency. Isn’t it my dear friends at quicksprout. http://www.cheers4all.com/ Siraj, it isn’t always the best source to generate traffic, however, if you get it right it can give you tremendous results!

Very well and descriptive article. I was searching for some informative article about stumbleupon and finally I found it here. It’s true that stumble upon can really produce a big traffic for your site but the contents must be rich. Good article. Keep it up.

I have been providing stumbleupon promotion services since last FOUR years and have done work with some of worlds top sites like collegehumor, cracked and uproxx. And my vast experience says that its really true that if you have a unique and quality content Stumbleupon will for sure drive you huge traffic :)))

Driving targeted, converting visitors is a Skill you will only acquire over time, it’s not a contest. Acquire the Skill. Determination, persistence and dedication will result in achievement. Success favors preparation.

You could definitely see your skills in thhe article you write.
The world hoes for even more passionate writers liike
you who are not afraid to mention how they believe. At alll times follow your heart.

Nice one…
actually i was doing stumbleupon blindly by creating links using that tags like ?s1 and ?s2 and so on.
Now, i came to know the real use of stumbleupon.
And now i think i can use stumbleupon much better than earlier.
Thank you so much for the share.

Hi Neil,
Great Article once again. I still using stumble upon to improvise my conversion rate. Well, right now you have given such information that i was hardly knowing about it. It will surely going to help me to improvise my conversion rate .

This amazing course will teach you, step by step, how to double if not triple your traffic over the next 30 days.

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About Neil Patel

Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg and Hello Bar. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 online marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. Neil has also been awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives. Continue reading